Webmaster Beware- Submitting your website to major search engines too often can get your website banned completely from those all important major search engines, like Google, MSN, Yahoo and Alta Vista.

Let’s face it, everyone wants coveted top position in their respective category on all major search engines. Getting there requires a lot of tweaking of your meta tags, reciprocal linking to sites with high page ranks, and of course submitting your site to search engines, either manually or utilizing a service to do it for you.

Submitting your site manually is a long a tedious operation, often requiring more time than you had planned on spending just to submit to 30 or less search engines. Submitting your site manually is not recommended.

Using a free service to submit your site is next option you have for getting your site to internet. The only problem with this method is that you get listed on only a few engines and, you sacrifice your email address to spam gods and become a part of millions of poor souls who can never get any rest from nasty spam vermin that will prey on you for rest of your natural born life. In addition, it becomes very hard to track how often you have submitted your site to search engines in first place.

Over past couple of months it has been quite noticeable that amount of time and effort that is going into website promotion is rapidly rising and therefore so is associated cost of keeping ahead of competition.

More and more people are devoting more and more time to website promotion and it is becoming a feature of nearly all website promotion campaigns that they are embracing all known search engine promotion techniques instead of exclusively relying on one or two methods.

What we are seeing at moment is a landshift change in promotion techniques. Only a year or so ago it was thought enough for a search engine optimisation company to optimise pages (on page optimisation) and submit website.

However now that competition is becoming ever fiercer off page optimisation is becoming a necessary requirement of any respectable website promotion campaign.

Let’s examine these two terms and see what we mean my “on page optimisation” and “off page optimisation”.

On page optimisation is process of tuning page for a search engine or more usually trying to make it rank highly on a selection of search engines. It’s no wonder that many search engine optimisation engineers focus on google exclusively as it certainly produces most traffic of all engines, but will that always be case? Things can change quickly in internet land.

Page optimisation strategies generally consist of using your keyword or keyword phrases in all of pages known “hotspots”. The page title, meta keyword, meta description, alt tags, first heading and body text. Subsequent “tweaks” can include bolding keyword phrase, using keyword phrase in a hyperlink and more.

To a point there is only so much that you can do to search engineer a page before it starts to look spammy, repeating keyword phrase over and over. Of course some “optimisers” still do this but it’s quickly becoming a frowned upon practice as it detracts sharply from a website wanting to produce a professional image, not to mention your chances of being banned from search engine altogether.

This is where “off page optimisation” takes over.

Both Google and Yahoo use a system of “ranking” websites dependent on several factors - one of which is how relevant content appears to be to keyphrase searched for (on page optimisation).

The second important criteria that your pages are judged on is how “popular” those pages are in comparison with your competition. Broken down into it’s basest form it means that more quality votes (links) that your page has then more popular it must be and so is promoted higher up search engine results. In google parlance this feature is known as “pagerank” and pagerank is a vitally important part of your website promotion campaign. If you don’t have any then you are standing naked in front of everybody and that’s not a nice feeling!